Women March Rhode Island Includes Sex Workers #WMWRI18

Coyote RI was one of the many local organizations who tabled at RI Women’s March.

We had a 60 people sign up for our email list, and over 100 people stopped at our table. We engaged with strippers from Westerly, and we had students from 3 universities and several communities members asking how they can volunteer with Coyote RI. Most importantly we got to educate our community and explain how Uncle Sam is the biggest pimp in the USA.

We explained that Uncle Sam seems to think that some people deserve to live in extreme poverty. Yet sex workers know that sex work puts food on the table and will lift them out of poverty.

Sex workers are being punished because they refuse to conform and allow Uncle Sam to pimp them out for a lower wage and worst working conditions. Meanwhile, Uncle Sam keeps increasing the price sex worker have to pay as far as legal punishment, incarceration, public shaming, discrimination, and violence.

Uncle Sam allows law enforcement to use force fraud and coercion to arrest sex workers. This raid and rescue system allows police officers to fraudulently pose as a client to engage in sexual acts with women, then arrest them for prostitution and seize their wages.

These human rights abuses are sponsored by Uncle Sam who heavily funds this alliance between carceral feminists community vigilante rescue groups and law enforcement to create trafficking task forces that inflict more harm and punishment to sex workers and further isolates them from their local communities. This carceral state system also removes the right for sex workers to associate and derails their efforts in organizing and in implementing harm reduction initiatives. It creates more barriers for sex workers to access services, and it removes their access to the justice system if they become a victim of violence or exploitation.

There are no bad women, just bad laws!

A huge thank you to Shanna Wells for organizing such a great event. Thank you to Elijah Edelman for helping Coyote RI table at the event. Thank You, Steve Ahlquist, for coming out to cover the event and all the local organizations who tabled. A huge thank you to Justice Gaines for including sex worker rights in her speech and interview with channel 6. Even Providence Journal stopped by our table so we could educate them about the misguided and harmful trafficking narrative that the US government is promoting. Thank You, Janis Mooradian, for bringing us more condoms. A special thank you to our community members who stopped by and who were outraged about the fact that Rhode Island criminalized sex workers in 2009. The community was very supportive. It was a great day.

We had some help hanging red umbrella from the statues at the state house, and we left one behind to remind Rhode Islander’s that SEX WORKER RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS!